Ducks' Foligno carries message from home

Dec. 22, 2010

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Current Ducks assistant Mike Foligno holds up a sabre in Buffalo after being honored by his former team. Foligno, who has two sons playing professional hockey as well as two daughters, says he thinks about his wife Janis, who died of breast cancer in 2009, almost every day. DAVID DUPREY, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Janis Foligno, wife of Ducks assistant coach Mike Foligno, died in July of 2009 from breast cancer. NOTHERNLIFE.CA

Current Ducks assistant Mike Foligno was the former captain of the Buffalo Sabres and was inducted into the team's hall of fame. Son Marcus was taken in the 2009 draft by the Sabres. GETTY IMAGES

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Ottawa Senators forward Nick Foligno, left, played for the Sudbury Wolves when his father Mike was the coach. Mike Foligno, now a Ducks assistant, will be coaching against his son next month with the Ducks play in Ottawa. FRANK GUNN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Current Ducks assistant Mike Foligno holds up a sabre in Buffalo after being honored by his former team. Foligno, who has two sons playing professional hockey as well as two daughters, says he thinks about his wife Janis, who died of breast cancer in 2009, almost every day.DAVID DUPREY, ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANAHEIM – Scars are cut below both eyes, separated by a smashed nose that, in a fit of pure symmetry, also is as bent as a hockey stick.

This face fought its way through the NHL, and it shows. Every stitch. Through 1,075 games, dodging fists one shift, exploding in goal-scoring delight the next. Thriving on tough mixed with talent, old-school ice hockey straight from the 1980s.

Fought for 15 seasons the face did, through stops in Detroit, Buffalo and then Toronto, classic winter homes where they celebrate scars and the sacrifices and gashes that forged them.

But now the face is as still as granite, its carved animation frozen, as Mike Foligno ponders this question: Have you lived a day yet without thinking of his late wife?

"No, it hasn't happened," he says. "I don't think it ever will, either. I don't want to ever forget her. You can't erase memories. You can create new ones, but you can't erase memories."

This hardened man, who wrestled, head-butted and bloodied opponents, who scored 370 NHL goals when he wasn't serving his sentence of 2,234 penalty minutes – That's more than 37 hours in the box, folks! – pauses. The face, already expressionless, doesn't change.

"This disease has no eyes," the face's owner says. "It doesn't care who you are."

Mike Foligno is in his first season as a Ducks assistant coach. He arrived here with a message he'd like to share.

But first, let's give his message context, wrap it in meaning, so the message can be better remembered.

They met in high school, and how classic is that? In the town of Sudbury, in Ontario. Their first date was a dance, of course. Mike picked up Janis. In his '68 Mustang. Old school, we told you.

She was athletic, with a pretty smile. He was just starting his career in the sport that would define so much of their life together. And from that day, well, that was pretty much it. Other than those first few months of Mike's time in the NHL, these two were a couple.

They wouldn't marry, though, until they were absolutely, hand-to-God sure. It was Mike's third year in the league. He was with the Red Wings and proposed in a revolving restaurant atop the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit.

Sitting along the windows, Mike revolving backward and Janis forward, he slyly placed the ring on a stationary ledge, figuring that in 10 minutes or so, it would right next to Janis. He also made sure their table would be facing Canada when she discovered the surprise.

They were laughing and drinking wine and small talking and drinking more wine and ... Oh, crap, it's been more than 10 minutes! Where's the ring? Holy jeez! The ring!

Mike told Janis to reach back and grab the little box on the window sill now a few feet behind her. And do it quickly.

"If I had waited 10 more minutes," he says today, smiling, "I would have had to marry someone sitting at the next table."

It was during their first year of marriage that Janis – her turn to surprise – handed Mike an envelope. He opened it to find ticket stubs, dozens of ripped stubs each with short notes written on the back. Big fight tonight, read one. Two goals and an assist, read another.

They were from four years earlier, Mike's final season in juniors, playing for the hometown Sudbury Wolves. A season in which he would score 65 goals and 150 points, convincing the Red Wings to use the third overall pick in the 1979 draft on him.

Janis attended every Wolves' home game that season and, so smitten was she by her man in the No. 17 sweater, that she had concluded each night with a brief recap of Mike's performance.

"At that point," he says, smiling again, "I think she had bigger plans than I did."

Their 27 years of marriage would produce countless memories and four children, sons Nick and Marcus and daughters Lisa and Cara. After Mike's playing career ended with a brief stint in Florida in 1994, he became a coach.

Janis, though, never stopped being a hockey wife or a hockey mom, her sons excelling in the sport just like her husband had done. Years later, Nick would call Janis his greatest supporter and Marcus would say, "Seeing her every day puts a fire in your belly to go out there and play for her."

By 1998, Mike was leading the Hershey Bears, then an affiliate of Colorado. The team would make the playoffs in each of his five seasons as head coach and he would sign an extension for another three years.

That's when the phone rang and someone suddenly was asking Mike, after 25 years of road trips and morning skates in foreign buildings and adopted hometowns, if he wanted to really come home.

The Sudbury Wolves were calling, and they needed a coach and general manager. They still had Foligno's number. How could they not? They had retired No. 17.

So he called Pierre Lacroix, then the Avalanche general manager, and explained, "This is a chance to give my kids a base." The family would be surrounded by aunts, uncles, in-laws, cousins. Surrounded by home. It all made sense now. The Foligno clan was going back to Sudbury, back to where it all began and was meant to continue.

Nine months later, Janis felt a lump in her breast. And now, only now, did it really make sense.

"All the questions were answered then," Mike says. "Maybe this is where we needed to be, you know what I mean? Sometimes you wonder, 'What's the big plan?' At that moment, it was like, 'Hey, this is why we're here now.'"

The next six years became a mash of emotions. Janis, after surgery and chemo, was battling the cancer and often winning; she had four years with relatively few problems. The Wolves turned it around and, in Mike's fourth season, advanced to the Ontario Hockey League finals for the first time in 30 years.

The 60-year-old, 5,000-seat Sudbury Community Arena, a place in which each time the home team scores, a stuffed wolf rolls down a pulley system to growl at the visiting bench, was selling out.

The first day Mike walked back into the old barn, retracing footsteps left when he was a teenager, he looked up and saw the exact spot where Janis would wait for him after games, a ripped ticket stub in her pocket.

Both Nick and Marcus became Wolves, playing for their dad. Nick eventually reached the NHL, where he's now with the Ottawa Senators. Marcus was taken in the 2009 draft by the Sabres, the same team his dad once captained and later would enshrine in its hall of fame.

All the Folignos were there that day in Montreal for the draft. All except Mom. Janis was too sick to travel.

"We were there, but she was the one who made it happen," Mike says. "She was the one who took Marcus to practice all those mornings. Without her, he wouldn't have been able to do any of this.

"I think it really bothered him that she couldn't be there. But he stayed strong because of his mother's strength that helped him get there in the first place."

Janis wanted desperately to live long enough to see her younger son get drafted, and she did. A month later, on July 27, 2009, the cancer finally won.

"She showed everyone around her what a battler she was," Mike says. "She was our motivation. She wanted to live so badly."

The message, remember? No, that's not it. Not yet. The message isn't about Janis. The message is Janis.

His daughters have become, in Mike's words, "the mother hens" of the Foligno clan now. Cara calls to check on the boys one time, Lisa calls the next time. Both girls have had numerous moments that Mike calls "very Janis-like." Then he adds, "I think they like that fact."

Lisa turned down a marketing job offer near Toronto to be with her mother at the end. She was there to cook, clean, rub Mom's back.

"I knew my wife did a good job when the kids reacted the way they did," Mike says. "What I learned about them is how strong they are, how they don't miss anything, how they respect the relationship that a married couple has together. They cherish the moments when we're open with them.

"When it's time for them to take the lead, they're capable. You don't hide things from your children. Share your life, your dreams, your plans, your morals, everything. You teach them respect by showing them respect. You teach them love by showing them love.

"We had a saying in our house. 'You give your kids two things – roots and wings.' You gave them a sense of roots so they know they have a leg to stand on. But also wings to carry them forward and elevate the lives of others they touch."

Yeah, you've got it, that's part the message, part of what Foligno wanted to share today. And here's the other part:

"We have to find an answer. Too many people are being stricken by this disease. We can't go on without someone finding an answer, even if by accident. Too many lives are being torn apart by it.

"My wife died at 47. Our family was devastated by this thing. It's a terrible way to go through life. You have to get tested and stay on top of it. It doesn't take long. Don't put it off. The time is miniscule when you compare it to the devastation that can happen if you don't do it."

When the Ducks play in Ottawa on Jan. 18 – the first Foligno versus Foligno match in history, coaching father against playing son – a bus will arrive from Sudbury, a 5½-hour drive away. The proceeds from the trip will go to the Janis Foligno Foundation.

At some point that day, Mike and Nick will come together, hug and exchange smiles and slaps on the back.

Neither will say it, but both will know it. Both will know that Janis, always the hockey wife and the hockey mom, is there, too, the message living on.

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